Earlier today there was a recommended diary by Soj, charging that the Saudi Arabian government was responsible for causing the widespread unrest among Muslims in response to the publication of several cartoons containing depictions of Mohammed - a taboo among some Muslims. The fact that the cartoons were actualy published
last September, but are only causing trouble now made this seem reasonable, or at least made it seem that the media isn't telling the whole story.
Later there was another recommended diary by DHinMI that contested the Saudi linkage and pointed out that the link provided by Soj as proof appeared to be a parody.
It seemed to me that the charges by Soj were serious, and so I called on my go-to guy on the Middle East: Juan Cole. Below is his detailed analysis, just for us :-)
According to Juan,
the charges are untrue:
It is being alleged in some quarters that the controversy over the Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad is somehow artificial or whipped up months later by the Saudis. This is not true. The controversy began in Denmark itself among the 180,000 Danish Muslims. It was taken up by the ambassadors of Muslim states in Copenhagen. Then the Egyptian foreign minister began making a big deal of it, as did Islamist parties in Turkey and Pakistan. The crisis has unfolded along precisely the sort of networks one would have expected, and become intertwined with all the post-colonial crises of the region, from the foreign military occupation of Iraq to the new instability in Syria and Lebanon.
Below is a press record on the controversy, drawn from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a translation service of the CIA that is later released under various commercial auspices, including BBC World Monitoring and World News Connection.
The Caricatures were published on 30 September in Copenhagen.
They provoked a protest of 5,000 Muslims there soon thereafter.
There follow several news items from the period between September and now, detailing the spreading unrest. Juan then closes with:
Anyway, the allegation that this thing was fanned by Saudi Arabia does not seem to be substantiated by the FBIS record, which shows Egypt's secular foreign minister to have been among the main fanners of the flame. Minor members of youth wings of Islamist parties in places like Pakistan then got into the action. Nor is it true that things were quiet after the immediate publication of the cartoons. Nor is it true that the Danish prime minister or the Jyllands-Posten expressed any sympathy for the hurt feelings of Muslims early on. Indeed, they lectured them on being uncivilized for objecting.
You can read Juan's whole analysis here.
Many thanks to Juan Cole for this rapid-reaction analysis! If you want to see Juan Cole talking about Iraq, you can watch my video interview with him at RealityBasedTV.com